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Comment by droopyEyelids | Hacker News Reader

There will always be people eager to point out the race of people who do wrong, when those people are Jewish.

I understand how it might seem OK to do that because Haaretz did the reporting here, but even leaving aside questions about the motivation of Hagar Shezaf and Jonathan Jacobson, Haaretz is an Israeli paper and I think those sorts of details could be left inside the country.

For those of us outside of Israel, it's enough to identify that a tech company is providing this software- without naming the nationality!

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> There will always be people eager to point out the race of people who do wrong, when those people are Jewish.

What was pointed here was an country government's agency, not ethnicity. I see nothing wrong in including that information and in, in fact, in favor of it.

This way, it's possible to have a grasp of what govts. are doing what, even though not much.

this is such a ridiculous perspective.

if it were American companies doing this, people wouldn't question the headline.

the truth is, nationality matters. not all countries would permit a private intelligence sector to exist like this, or perform these types of services. understanding that the israeli government permits this behavior helps contextualize their complicity.

Additionally:

1. “Jewish” is not a race, it's a religion.

2. How do we know, and what does it matter, how religious those people are?

Jewish is an ethnicity that encompasses the national and cultuarl affiliation of its adherants in a similar way that a person might identify as Kurdish, and it is additionally a term used to describe the religion of the Jewish people. You can say Muslim is not an ethnicity (Persian and Arab are). But that's not an accurate thing to say about the Jews.

Like many things in life, there is a lot more nuance once you dive past the surface. There are in fact numerous jewish ethnicities, it's not one homogeneous group. Some of those jewish ethnicities, such as the Beta Israel (aka Ethiopian Jews) have been discriminated against by the rest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel#Depo_Provera_...

Given the discrimination the Beta Israel have faced; particularly the sterilization controversy; it's important to recognize the ethnic diversity of the jewish community, lest some parts of it be forgotten and erased.

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